TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Roi Guitián
This capacity building in communication aimed at gathering staff members in charge of communication from IVS organizations from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Togo in order to :
1) Foster among IVS organisations communication skills and abilities including digital storytelling and media production.
2) Analyse and work to improve the communication strategy of the participant organizations
3) Bring strategic and technical support for the production of stories for the IVS WEBDOC, which was be created in January 2018 and will be the starting point of a global communication campaign from February to October 2018.
4) Increase awareness about the importance of an inclusive and no patronising communication.
5) Promote positive narratives about volunteering and intercultural exchanges.
This 5days training was part of MediaAfrica project, wich aimed to increase the communication skills of IVS organizations as well as to promote positive and no patronizing narratives about IVS between Europe and Africa.
These objectives were agreed during the steering committee meeting at the beginning of the project. For that purpose there were three different trainings in France, Tanzania and Uganda. This is the last of them.
Coordinator of the project was Solidarite Jeunesses, from France and there was one person of this organization during the training. Also, the hosting organization of the training was UPA, from Uganda, who were in charge of all logistic issues.
Trainers team were three people: Adeline from SJ-France, María from Spain and me. All of us were specialists in media from different approaches: Adeline photographer, Maria journalist and me digital media.
Participants were coming from four different countries (Kenya, Togo, Uganda & Tanzania) and all of them were staff members & volunteers from different organizations, to ensure that they could put into practice the learnings of the training. In order to know that, we sent a form before the training trying to select and adapt the most relevant contents and also made a follow up after the training to check the media contents they were producing.
At last, as the project was aimed to encourage young people to join the voluntary service, all the volunteers that participated in these trainings were aged 18-30 years old. Also, organizations staff that participated were almost all of them under 30. The target of the project were young people so we encouraged organizations to involve young people into their communication teams.
Our approach was learning-by-doing, a methodology which is used, both, in formal and non-formal education. It means learning of knowledge/skills through real based experience. In that cases, we were addressing a non-formal training on communication: how to raise awareness campaign, positives narratives, volunteering core values… This could be done in many different ways. In our case, being a non formal training, we set challenges they had to solve in small teams. Through this process they learn knowledge (even technical) but because they demand it to solve an issue. In this way, we aimed to deliver some theory but we wanted this theory not to be isolated but directly related with their needs: improving the number and quality of volunteers.
So that, our approach included:
- Providing tools for analysing their organization’s communication
- Watching, reading and analysing own media contents contents.
- Watching, reading and analysing good practices.
- Define and rewrite their communication strategy.
- Small real-based exercises
- Producing creative Media with the advice of trainers
- Peer-to-peer learning through discussions and trainers feedback.
- Providing small theory inputs and tips to improve their communication skills.
Some of the activities we ran:
1) Communication strategy, what is it and how to build it up. We analysed collectively their communication to check strengths and weakness. After that, we moved into defining their organization core values through an activity in which they had to write the mission and values of their organizations first in a sheet, then half a sheet, 5 lines, one sentence. Once we know that we moved into addressing and discussing their objectives, audience, storytelling… This activity was accomplished the whole week.
2) Social media: We delivered small ordinary situations and they had to decide different ways to tell them: formal, informal, catchy... We continued with a similar exercise but with images: learning how to frame a photo, angles, composition, etc. For all this practices we used their smartphones to be sure that technical resources won't be a problem when back to their organizations.
3) Audiovisual Creation. We watched and exchanged around the TED Talk “The danger of a single story” This was aimed to introduce the topic and main purpose of the webdoc: to build positive narratives around Africa and about volunteering. To foster their imagination we facilitated a brainstorming activity. In different parts of the room there were three cardboards, each one has one question: “Which is your goal? ”, “What answers or reactions would you like to provoke ?” and “Which kind of person/character would you like to find in your story ?”. After answering that they had to work individually on their projects audiovisual project with the help of production & writing templates. Meanwhile, the three trainers were helping and solving different doubts to the participants. During this activity we also introduced a pitching simulation where participants had to tell their story to the others. All of them evaluated if they found it was an interesting idea, give feedback about what they understood, what did they like more or less? how could it be improved, etc.
1) Some evaluation inputs:
« It's been a really nice experience, not only for my NGO work but I have learnt a lot for my ICT career especially social media and video capture and storytelling power. Thanks so much for sharing with me. »
« It has been so great because I got the opportunity to edit my tiny project with the trainer and learnt a lot about social media which was one of my interesting areas. Very satisfied . »
« The trainers are very productive and one is able to understand very well when they explain and lastly, they are very patience when teaching until we get it right. They also give us time to do the work practically which I really find useful because I'm able to achieve lot in the process.
Am very much satisfied with the information the trainers portrayed. »
« We can use the Skills provided to produce many stories in our organisation for future even if not for the Medafrica «
2) Photos : https://ivsmediafrica.tumblr.com/
3) WebDoc (some contents started in the training):
https://roundtripvolunteering.com/
As said before, trainers team were three people: Adeline from SJ-France, María from Spain and me. All of us were specialists in media from different approaches: Adeline photographer, Maria journalist and me digital media.
We had worked together before as trainers so we knew very well each other and managed to deliver an homogeneous training. To do that, we prepared this training together online and then face to face in Uganda so our different expertise was blended.
Personally, I introduced and analysed good practices in social media and photography. Support the different participants into audiovisual creativity and gave advices into non-patronising storytelling. I also was in charge of documenting the training with photos.
All in all, I think that the most interesting point of this training, from a trainers point of view, is that despite sharing skills we managed to work very naturally together and I think that this could also be perceived by the participants.